In Dungeon Petz, players take on the roles of imps running a business breeding and selling pet monsters for Dungeon Lords to use in their evil dungeons. The game takes place over several rounds in which players will obtain animals and see to their needs to raise them to adulthood. In addition, players may have their pets compete in contests for extra points.

Mage Knight can be devastating, but only rarely - the vast majority of the time all the information you need in order to act safely is available.

There are some cases, such as raiding tombs, that can be risky. You don't get to see the monster you'll fight until you commit to the engagement, and there are some nasty ones - such as medusa, which can petrify (paralyze) you, which means that you discard every card in your hand except for wounds.

The result of this is twofold: you usually lose some very good cards (you don't want to be raiding an unknown place with a weak hand!) and you're very unlikely to be able to finish the fight successfully (you have no cards in your hand, and you can't bring allies into tombs). Granted, you can usually block the attack, but I've had a few times where I was just 1 defense shy of it and it set me back a huge amount.

Where Mage Knight is really devastating is when fighting cities, where you can encounter 3+ enemies that each would be very difficult on their own. You can bring other players to help you, but if you're playing competitively you'll be missing out on a chance to gain a huge lead (or catch up to an opponent that has a huge lead).

I feel this is more true with Dungeon Lords. Just getting a positive score in that game is a win in my book. With Dungeon Petz I was able to roll with it almost immediately. It's not an easy game, for sure, but compared to it's sister game it's a lot lighter.

This is my most recent acquisition and we have been thoroughly enjoying it so far.

The art is just terrific and I found the mechanics to all mesh together very well with the theme. It is also very challenging as there are many variables you need to factor in to successfully taking care of your pet. As well as traditional worker placement action spaces, you also need to juggle the needs cards while keeping an eye on upcoming contests and customers. When you manage to do well it is incredibly satisfying.

I have found it to be special in the way that you actually develop an emotional bond to these little cardboard creatures. When you are able to give them everything they need, it makes you happy. If you cannot play with them, they are sad and you are sad. You end up taking care of them as best you can not just because it is the point of the game and how you score, but because you really want them to be happy.

To the other fans, what is your favorite pet? I am partial to Dunguin as I am a sucker for birds and puns.

Have you played Dungeon Lords as well? Dungeon Petz is at the top of my wishlist. But Dungeon Lords feels a too rule heavy for the 12 major decisions you make in the course of the game. My wife also does not particularly enjoy the Combat phase. I think Dungeon Petz will be a better fit for us. But if it feels too similar to Dungeon Lords, I will regret not getting something different.

I think Dungeon Petz will be a better fit for you as well. I own and have played both on multiple occasions, and I find Dungeon Lords to be more of a very very difficult puzzle culminating in the combat phase (the most interesting part of the game, IMO)

Dungeon Petz in comparison is still puzzle like, but is far more forgiving, and it feels like it breaks the decisions you make into smaller, less abstract, more manageable chunks. I tend to feel like I have a much better idea of how well I'm doing in Dungeon Petz as the game progresses, versus generally feeling a little clueless in Lords.

My primary grip is the gradual reveal of goals (the dungeon lords who come to buy your grown up pets from you.) Sometimes you'll make a leveraged bid early in the game on a type of pet that simply does not end up being lucrative in the late game, which can be a bit frustrating. That being said, it does make the game fundamentally a little more lighthearted, as luck plays a more obvious part in the game.

I'm a huge Vlaada fan and this is one of his strengths to me. If you like it you should check out the rules to Galaxy Trucker or Space Alert - both also hilarious and do a great job of introducing things simply and clearly.

Have space alert. Like the rule manual a lot. The tutorials are well done and help to absorb the game. Too bad its a little too crazy for my group (we drink a lot). I do not see much appeal in galaxy trucker :/

This game was actually the first real board game I bought. The style and theme spoke to me so much that I just had to have it.

I very much enjoy it although it can get deceivingly long and slow down when you really take your time to think about your turns. I'm planning to introduce an hourglass element to it to keep it limited.

Great game. Got this for my birthday at the end of Feb and we've gotten two plays in. It's got a ton of moving pieces, but after you iron out the kinks, it's all quite intuitive. Fun and humorous game that people enjoy even if they are doing poorly. :)

I like the fact it's really hard to tell who's going to win down to the last round and ending phase of the game. I played it yesterday where the last placed player managed to score a 21 point sale to take the lead x.X

Has anyone messed around with the 'dummy' imps that you use when playing with 2 players. They have a set rotation every game, but I was wondering if anyone has tried changing that rotation and how it worked out for them.

I think the dummy system works great and is very smooth, but was wondering how changing it would affect gameplay.

If you don't start the dummy imps in that exact position, your first round would either start with no meat for sale, or no vegetables for sale. You'd want to house rule the mixed meat/veg space, or it could screw over anybody who ended up with a food need.

Fantastic game. Took us a couple playthroughs and watching a video here/there to get it all digested. Not sure how I feel about the expansion so far, may have gone a bit caligula crazy but the modularity of it is quite nice.

Love the game, my gaming group (the ones that have tried it) not so much. Six different people in the group have tried it, no one whants to play it again. But I have my hopes up, there are two more in the group that whants to try it, so hopefully they will like it. Otherwise I will just play it with my wife.

The expansion looks really fun with all the new things, but I will wait before I buy it until I have played the base game some more.

this game is at the top of my wishlist. i want to want it, but something about it is just putting me off. i don't know what. i love vlaada, i love the idea of the theme. i guess it just looks complicated. someone sell me on this.

It's a pretty complicated game, but it's mostly open information. You'll need at one player who's really comfortable learning the rulebook, so that he can set up the board, handle the turn-by-turn maintenance. He'll need to remember which monsters get older, which monsters get taken off the board, how much food is for sale, how much money everybody earns, stuff like that. He'll help people count their score sometimes too.

As long as you have one person who can fit that role, he can guide everybody else through the game. Your turns are usually pretty simple, you're only doing one thing at a time. First you split your imps and money into groups. Maybe you buy a cage, and buy a pet. You put your pet in a cage. You get dealt some cards, and you play cards on your pets. It's the kind of game kids could play with their parents, almost everything is out in the open so it's easy to help them play by the rules if they don't understand everything. If you can imagine playing Ticket To Ride or Chess with very small children, it's like that. Maybe a 5-year old doesn't build the best routes, maybe he tries really hard to get all of his pawns to the other side of the board when it doesn't make sense. Maybe his parents have to show him which cities he's going to. He can still play and have fun.

I love the game because the theme is fun, and it has a good combination of luck and skill. It's fun putting yourself in the place of your imps, imagining yourself racing to buy some valuable artifacts before your opponents, playing with your pets and feeding them 3-week-old spinach just before it goes rotten. Sometimes you'll get unlucky and lose, but the luck is for thematically funny reasons, "Golems don't eat!! What kind of poor confused golem starves to death!?" "I didn't know a farmer was coming... My dragon just wasted all of his best poops!!"

Where does this game fit in on the wide spectrum of worker placements? I've got Lords of Waterdeep and Spyrium right now and while I like the look of this game, I don't want to make anything redundant.

This game is pretty intense, I'd give it a 3.5/5 or a 4/5 complexity. Rules probably take 20 minutes to go over, but the game is very intuitive and the rulebook is a blast to read.

Also, only 1/2 the game is worker placement and I probably only think about the worker placement aspect for 1/4 of the game while playing. I wouldn't group Dungeon Petz with Tzolk'in, Agricola, The Manhattan Project, etc..

I wanted to like this game, but just couldn't. I guess I was expecting the petz to actually have personalities and that you'd actually care about them in some way, but I didn't feel that. One pet seems the same as any other, and their needs seem to just get abstracted into different colors. I guess its good business practice not to become attached to the merchandise you're ultimately trying to sell, but this game just felt empty to me.

So, yeah, it still just comes down to matching colors for me. I like the mechanics of the game, but the theme is just disconnected for me. I know I'm in the minority on this one though. Perhaps I just had different expectations going into it, and never got over those?

Definitely fully possible. It is a game that, I think, you need to reach out to to get the narrative feedback. It relies on you translating mechanics and game interactions that are fairly "dry" into a story. Just doesn't always work for everyone.

i really enjoyed reading this thread even though i haven't played the game. i think there is something interesting in how important our connection to a theme is and how if a game grabs you you end up projecting your own narrative onto it.

thinking particularly about the current crop of hidden role games and how rich they seem considering they're just a bunch of cards & portraits.

Goes to show how different experiences can be for people. I've played twice, and once we got past the first round of "now...what happens" seeing the pets flip over and trying to maximize the needs turns ahead was one of the most enjoyable things. The colors DO mean something, and in a very themeatic way IMO. If I've got an animal in the pen already that is more likely to be playful and hungry... I'm not going to like seeing multiple angry pets appear for the next round of the game because I want to be sure I can care for all the animals without being forced to play awful cards. Then when you have to consider the dungeon lord's desires on top of that... sheesh!

I've only played one game but I was really grabbed by the theme. I lost horribly, by my opponent got this adorable "Cthulie" pet, and impressed everyone with his magic tricks and was a big hit for children's day, while my talentless pets frightened all the children by shitting everywhere. It was one of the first games in awhile where I could really immerse myself in the theme, and I felt jealous of her pet store's cool magical pet.

I actually got to play this this week. 2 player. With a newb and he won. I think this game is beautifully elegant.... all the mechanics exist for a reason thematically, everything clicks once everyone knows the rules. It just works. I think that if more newbs had the patience to learn a game with complicated rules, this would be a fantastic gateway game.

I'd compare it to Agricola. There's a lot of fiddly upkeep moments, but the decisions and actions themselves are quite simple. The upkeep phase is something like, "The vegetable station starts empty because there's an NPC there... The vegetable and meat station would normally get 2 vegetables and 2 meat, but we only add 1 meat this time, because an NPC is in this special red square. The meat station gets 2 meat, and an extra meat because of this mysterious meat rule." By contrast, the player actions are something like, "I put an imp here and take this meat, because my pet needs meat." "I play two food cards and one poop card, so my pet eats two meat, and then poops."

While the box says 12 and up, I'd say you really need at least one 15+ year old to handle the upkeep, while an 8-year-old could probably play the game. This is pretty comparable to Agricola, where my 7 and 9 year old niece/nephew can play, they just need some grownups to make sure they don't forget any rules.

Having only enjoyed one other big heavy euro ever (Archipelago) I'm hoping that the theme and charm, with Vlaada's mechanical genius carries it through.

Does anyone have any input on how the game measures up to the other big name euros specifically in terms of how it facilitates narrative? Archipelago is great for us mostly because of the story the game makes as you play.

I think the theme comes through stronger than in other Euros I have played. I think the narrative develops as you watch your pet grow and prepare them for an impending contest or customer.

When meeting their needs we also enjoy telling a little story to go along with it. "Well, he was hungry so I fed him but then that made him sick so he ended up pooping all over his cage which caused him to get quite angry and attempt to escape."